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Startup Aims To Make The Workplace, And The World, Smarter

Austhink Software of Australia has developed an application that it says can help employees not just work smarter, but become smarter. This isn't your typical business intelligence app, but intelligence software that applies "brain mapping" to the goal of better decision making.

Austhink Software was formed in 2004 as a spinoff of Austhink Consulting, an eight-year-old consultancy that trains clients in critical thinking and "structured argumentation." Following two rounds of funding, Austhink Software announced in May that it was entering the U.S. market. The company has two products: Rationale, an application that fosters critical thinking and communications skills in schools, and bCisive, an application designed to help employees structure and visualize their thoughts, or what it calls decision mapping.

While it sounds esoteric, Austhink describes bCisive as an everyday productivity tool that can be used to create and communicate business cases, share ideas, build consensus, collaborate, and document the reasoning behind business decisions.

Austhink was founded by Tim Van Gelder, who served as its CEO until recently transitioning over to CTO. Van Gelder's background is as a cognitive scientist at the University of Melbourne, where he developed and used his software with students and teachers. The company has begun having success selling outside of that niche. Customers include Ernst and Young, Cypress Bioscience, KorteQ, and intelligence agencies in the United States and Australia.

The key question is whether Austhink's $349 software really makes people smarter. The company substantiates that claim by saying that students who used Rationale improved their critical thinking skills by the equivalent of 12 IQ points in a semester. Van Gelder is "convinced that business users can get smarter," too, according to the company.

Van Gelder points to Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the PC mouse, as the inspiration for his work. In the 1960s, Engelbart postulated that, by mapping the brain's decision-making process, humans could become a "smarter race." Austhink says its software can help deliver on that theory.

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